This whole "fake news" thing is absolutely ridiculous. What's interesting to me is that I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The problem is much less to do with facts, and much more to do with implications or conclusions, which many news sources dish out handily.
I don't think it was ridiculous to begin with (neither was "terrorism") but it's ridiculous now.
I would define "fake news" as news published by people who know what they're publishing is false. My feeling is that either there were more of those kinds of articles floating around this past election or they were more visible.
You might just call it clickbait, but "fake news" didn't seem like an inapt descriptor until it started being applied to everything someone disagrees with.
There are certainly "facts" that I have heard people say or spread online that were clearly false like millions of illegals voted in the last election (when in reality one article claimed that and had lots of rebuttals and now has a disclaimer at the top of the article) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/illegal-immigrants-2008-el...
However, the fact stands that there are also a lot more cases of wildly different interpretations of the same fact. We can look at poverty rates or crime rates and draw very different conclusions about the causes or solutions to those problems based on the same information.
"Fake news" has become a cure for cognitive dissonance, but it started out as "pizzagate" and its ilk. That certainly was fake, somewhat effective, and toxic. It's still around. Check out qanon, spirtcooking, etc.
Funny seeing such a local and current political tribe-based perspective in a discussion on the history of fake news.
As if they just happened to be witness to the spawning of some new phenomenon which also happens to be caused by their pet political opponents. Meanwhile in reality it's really been one of the oldest products of human-fallible mass media consumption (see: low investment content targeting emotion driven responses) used by every political ideology who happens to have influence over particular media sources.
That may have been your introduction, of a popular/easy punching-bag demographic pushing their own politically convenient narrative. But this particular story hardly extends beyond a niche of extremists (or at most a sizeable group of hopelessly low-education voters) on Reddit/Twitter. Notably these days including a large percentage of trolls who know better but will happily push it because they enjoy getting reactions.
I find it interesting to see how this type of misrepresentation and FUD is spawned by otherwise smart people. Beyond simply being young and naive by thinking everything you recently discovered is a new phenomenon. And ultimately I believe it has to do with their exposure to media within their small bubble of content sources, followed by a mass extrapolation to the wider public who identify with their adversarial political party. So they legitimately think it's an important problem and feature of x group, instead of almost every group a) by dumb subset after certain scale or b) the ideas of an entirely fringe group. But usually it's just a vocal minority of a niche forum gets applied to the wider public.
If outrage and reactionary politics was scaled to the actual influence and power of the groups they see as a threat the world would be a far more boring and stable place. But that doesn't sell Buzzfeed pageviews, or any newspaper commercially incentivized exaggerated narratives, nor does it translate well to 2-3 sentence long comments on social media sites.
Pandering, oversimplification, and snarky soundbites is what sells on reddit. It's the perfect platform for overblown FUD to spread. Which is iornic given how Redditors love to attack TV shows, targeting the emotions of the lowest common denominators, for doing the same.
I agree with almost everything you write here, but I just want to make clear that my comment was about the term "fake news", and not reactionary outrage, FUD, attack TV shows, Reddit, or anything else.
There is an entire world of straight-up fabricated "journalism" disguised as reputable reporting which gets immense circulation on social media networks. It is very easy to not experience this sort of thing, using fairly basic but overall uncommon steps. For instance, I don't use Twitter and I've filtered all my random acquaintances (e.g. random people I knew in high school) from my FB feed years ago. But there are patently false links being passed around at an enormous rate on these sites, and people that don't personally invest themselves into that sort of social media, or simply don't discriminate between who they see stuff from, get exposed to it a lot.
That's weird, I constantly see friends spreading outright incorrect, political trolling from clickbait factories like "Daily World Upate" or "America’s Last Line of Defense".
Bombs hit Syria vs bombs intercepted. Gassing by Syria vs false flag by Britain. Clearly, we do run into situations where multiple sets of facts are put forward. So fake news is not a ridiculous thing that never happens. Suggesting that it is because not all news is intentionally fake is like saying there is no such thing as war because we don't often see people killing each other.
Moving away from extreme cases, things are still wrong enough to cause trouble. False information is inherently surprising when presented as true, because it isn't expected. It follows that false information lends itself better to clickbait titles. This in turn leads to false information having better click through and sharing metrics. Sharing metrics and engagement metrics are used to power recommendation systems. So it follows that recommendation systems are biased toward recommending false information. Compounding the issue, content producers know this. They optimize their content for an environment which promotes false information, which biases content in a way that generates the sort of speculative conclusions you mention. As a natural consequence of the flawed environment, this flawed content is then seen by a greater number of people.
That out news system isn't as good as would like is just true. I still remember the TED talk when I found out about how much better the world was doing by most metrics. All those educated and rich people who could afford to attend a TED talk and yet the majority had no idea as to the true state of the world. If the news wasn't biased such that it presents a false narrative, then why such glaring ignorance among the educated?
Its a concerted effort to discredit expert opinion which the shorter term goal of allowing people to equate their own laymen's understanding with that of someone versed in a subject.
This is one of my pet peeves, people who boast about stumbling upon the correct solution and/or being first to something, but can't justify or backup their claim. Even worse is when they do the research afterwards to attempt to retrofit an answer. A derivative of this is when you have/know only one thing, but can't justify it in the absence of knowledge of the alternatives, but you still rally for it as if you were knowledgeable.
In math, if you only write the correct answer, you'll get a zero for not showing your work. In debate and discussions, there can zero, one, or more than one correct solution to a topic, and "showing your work" is often more valuable than having an answer, and answers can be right or wrong explicitly depending on your work.
Totally! I was one of these people in high school math! I remember clearly thinking "but i got the right answer >:(" and now as a professional engineer i reminisce about people who want to know why you are right.
Disclosure: I am a Nate Silver fan. Nate's expert opinion is only valuable if you accept the premise, which is that prediction science involves a range of possible outcomes. If you accept that premise, which I do, his opinion on the 2016 election, in which he stated several times that the odds of a Trump presidency were actually higher than most of the polls suggested, was arguably a more valuable opinion than either a coin toss, or most of the individual polls.
Yeah this seems to be the disconnect. A lot of people will intuitively think (myself included) something like this. "You said Hillary had 90% chance to win, but Trump won. Therefore your prediction was WRONG". It actually takes a little more thought to understand that a Trump victory was a possibility in the model all along. And that you cannot say whether or not a prediction model is accurate based on a SINGLE result.
Moreover, if someone makes a lot of predictions of people having "90% chance to win" and all of them win, that is a less accurate prediction than if roughly 10% of them lose.
You got lucky. If you can consistently beat his methodology then you'd be just as famous and wealthy and well regarded as he is instead of an internet nobody.
This is like saying "college is for the birds, I just plan to win the lottery."
>Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine?
Absolutely. Missing the boat on what turned out to be something of a freak-show election where 77,000 votes out of than 136 million ballots cast is tough for anyone to get right. And most of who, did so by dumb luck, not some wonderful new methodology that is useful against past election data or current election data. The very same people beating their chests over Trump's win predicted Moore would win Alabama or Saccone would beat Lamb.
In other words its just dumb partisanship, not some new polling or statistical technique at work here. Patting yourself on the back because you 'called it' for Trump is a meaningless statement unless you have the math to prove your methods are better than Nate Silvers.
Silver predicted a fairly high probability of a very close election, including a 10.8% chance Clinton would win the popular vote and lose the electoral vote.
> All he said was that it would be closer than a landslide.
No, Silver's model provided a lot more detail than that.
The original meaning was literally something that looks like a news report, but reports as fact something that didn't actually happen and isn't obviously satire. As an example, "Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump".
That was, in fact a fake news story. The fact it asserted had no basis in reality.
The definition of "fake news" when I first heard the term more or less dealt with sites parroting outright falsehoods. It didn't necessarily have to be explicitly political. False gossip sites, outrage-inducing headlines to the wild side of the tabloids, fake business news (http://fortune.com/2017/05/30/fake-news-sites-local-business...), troll-ish article sites (ala the National Report), homeopathy woo (ala Natural News), and other conspiracy oriented venues (eg GlobalResearch, Infowars) were among the many types of "fake news" out there.
The political angle it has taken is unfortunate -- due to the prominence of "fake news" in the last US election; the net effect has been a devolution of the word into a snarl word for "I don't like your particular political point of view". IMHO what you are describing -- a news organization has a bias or opinion (strong or not), but still tries to maintain some degree of connection with factual data -- is not fake news.
You don't even have to look past the current President, who is the most prominent member of the Republican party and to a degree the political rightwing in the US. He tells outright lies on a regular basis.
He lies about trivially verifiable things like the weather and number of people at his inauguration, past statements he has made, about whether any presidents between Reagan and himself have cut taxes, about peoples faces openly bleeding from a facelift, about CNN/WaPo/NYT "failing", about the murder rate, etc, etc, etc.
That's about as useful as saying that Wikipedia may contain nonsense and therefore you shouldn't believe anything in Wikipedia. If you have examples of things on Snopes that are wrong then please supply them.
The beauty of Snopes is that it provides citations for its particular claims. People saying "Snopes is biased" in response to a Snopes article being posted don't tend to provide citations for why they think that particular Snopes article is inaccurate.
You're welcome to challenge their items on a line by line basis. Type it out, I'll wait.
There are also lots of other sources. I think playing up a 'no true scotsman' just empowers the liars because at a certain point you're just arguing that truth cannot be verified by anyone.
They have no valid credentials other than having been on the Internet a long time and having an interest in researching urban legends as laymen. One of the founders, David Mikkelson, couldn't answer questions about fact-checking due to legal issues[1].
If you really want to play the "HN says the names of logical fallacies" game, then I'll do you one better and say that challenging me to refute every single line item is an appeal to authority and we should just trust them because everyone says we should. There's no reason to believe them any more than there's a reason to believe much of anything published on somebody's personal website.
This is a reversed appeal to authority, and the fact that you keep attacking “credentials” rather than anything solid is telling. As Vkou said, they cite their sources. I’ll take that over vague hand-waving around credentials any day. Like people who dismiss Wikipedia, the issue is that you need a case-by-case basis to dismiss cited works.
They weren't appealing to authority though. An appeal to authority is "It's true because Snopes says so", they just linked to Snopes' reasoning as a shorthand for repeating the reasoning themselves.
If Snopes didn't provide their reasoning, it would be an appeal to authority.
You are defending the expert status of indisputable laymen by demanding a line by line refutation of everything they have ever written? And this seems not merely reasonable to you but you perceive it as upholding good reasoning and logic itself?
Every single one of Snopes' items could be correct and it wouldn't save your argument, because you're relying on the idea that what Snopes chooses to debunk is an unbiased representation of who actually tells more lies.
I was quite fond of the Weekly World News, particularly their article on how there was a gate to Hell in North Dakota and the Governor sending a tactical team to try to kill the devil.
